Known predator released

The newly emancipated black-footed ferret didn’t like his new digs at all.

Just released into a prairie dog hole from a cage Wednesday by Pueblo ranchers Gary and Georgia Walker, the ferret shot up out of the ground, chattered at bystanders, scrambled for cover among scrubby brush and finally settled on a hole more to its own liking.

Be fearful, prairie dogs. Be very fearful.

“These are killing machines,” said Pete Gober, who coordinates the black-footed ferret release program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They are wild animals that just have one thing in mind — killing prairie dogs.”

For the Walkers, that would be a godsend. Since 2000 the number of acres of their ranch land north of Pueblo West destroyed by prairie dogs has tripled to 10,000 acres of the 60,000-acre ranch.

A total of 35 ferrets went to work to reduce the prairie dog stronghold at several locations on Walker Ranches Wednesday.

“When you see a tumbleweed in Pueblo West, you can thank the prairie dogs,” Gary Walker told a crowd that gathered to celebrate the first release of black-footed ferrets under a new Safe Harbor Agreement. “I started out 20 years ago to get black-footed ferrets. We finally have a situation where landowners can help with an endangered species without putting restrictions on their land.”

Walker prefers the natural predator to poisoning or shooting the prairie dogs.

The federal agreement allows the release of endangered species such as the black-footed ferret onto private land without holding the landowner responsible for incidental deaths. Neighboring landowners also are protected if they do not intentionally kill the wild ferrets. It’s a 180-degree shift from previous federal policy that put restrictions on lands where endangered species were found.

Black-footed ferrets have been raised by the Fish and Wildlife Service and zoos in the United States and Canada since 1991, from the survivors of the last known colony, which was found in Wyoming in 1981, when the species was thought to be extinct.

About 300 black ferrets are in breeding programs, with an estimated 500 living in the wild.

Releases are not always successful, since the ferrets are susceptible to plague and canine distemper. Of 21 releases in the past 22 years, only four or five sites have sustained healthy populations, with a similar number struggling to hold on, Gober said.